Nadezhda Mandelstam

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam (1899–1980) was a Russian writer and memoirist. She was the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam and became a crucial witness to the persecution of writers under Joseph Stalin. After her husband’s arrest and death in a Soviet transit camp, she preserved his poems and worked to keep his legacy alive. Her own reputation rests chiefly on two memoirs, *Hope Against Hope* and *Hope Abandoned*, which recount their lives, the climate of fear and denunciation, and the mechanisms of Stalinist repression. Written with moral urgency and sharp observation, the books became landmark testimonies of the era.